Sundar Narayanan : Desi Engineer in California married to a Desi Engineer. This is a log of my travel experience, food reviews and life's "little" quirks. . .

Disclaimer : My thoughts on this site are not intended to cause physical emotional or financial harm to any person or thing mentioned in this site or to the reader and I take no responsibiilty for the same.. So read at your own risk!! I also hope this font is large enough to be considered legal and small enough not to make my blog ugly !

Saturday, August 01, 2009

A bouquet of roses - HDR Photography

Yesterday, our friends got us a bouquet of roses for the pooja. They are really beautiful roses and have a rich variety of colors.

The photo crazy idiot that I am, started taking pictures of the flowers. The colds were captured but somehow the depth of the roses were not coming out on the JPG's.

Then thought of using the HDR software and shot a series of pictures with the tripod and set it to a 2.4 second exposure with a range of aperture settings from

4.0,4.5, 6.0, 6.3, 7.1, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, 11.0, 13.0, 18.0, 20.0

and then using the software superimposed select pictures to get a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image from this subset.

Sure enough, the image takes on more depth and gets the bright and dark ares of the roses to have the same amount of detail..

Here are two such composites.

One with almost all of the aligned images..

and one with a smaller subset..

Two realizations at the end of the photo editing process.

1. HDR is the closest I have seen a photograph capture what we see with our eyes.

2. Our eyes are way ahead! Way way way way ahead than any camera or software. God is the most brilliant camera maker! He provides us fantastic subjects like roses and fantastic images to our brain, courtesy of some amazing cameras, our eyes.

The fun continues tonight. Planning to go to my all time favorite, most photographed architectural subject in the bay area tonight..